Taboola buys e-commerce personalization firm Commerce Sciences, and will offer its services for publishers as Commerce Sciences shuts down its existing business
I'm very excited to share our acquisition … Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal : Taboola Acquires Website Personalization Specialist Commerce Sciences Anat Bein-Leibovitz / Globes Online : Taboola acquires Israeli co Commerce Sciences See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 deal is an early move in what became Taboola's signature playbook: raise strategic capital — including the $117M round from Comcast and other strategics aimed at strengthening its recommendation platform — then acquire capability companies and fold their tech into the publisher widget. The video-recommendation purchase of ConvertMedia followed the same pattern months later.
Commerce Sciences matters here because it points Taboola at commerce data specifically: instead of just recommending sponsored content, the company gains personalization technology tuned to buying intent, which it will resell to publishers while the acquired startup's own merchant-facing business is wound down.
First-order effects
- Publishers on Taboola's network gain access to Commerce Sciences' e-commerce personalization tooling through their existing relationship, no new vendor required.
- Commerce Sciences' current merchant customers are cut off: the startup shuts down its standalone business as part of the acquisition, forcing them to find another personalization provider.
Second-order effects
- Rival content-recommendation players — most directly Outbrain, which Taboola would later attempt to consolidate outright in a $250M cash-and-equity deal — face pressure to match commerce-driven personalization rather than compete purely on sponsored-content inventory.
- The deal pushes pricing power toward whoever owns both publisher distribution and purchase-intent data, a combination that culminated years later in Taboola's $800M acquisition of retail-focused ad network Connexity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content recommendation stops being a media business and becomes a commerce-intent business: widgets that once sold sponsored-article clicks evolve into product-recommendation surfaces, with advertisers paying for proximity to purchase decisions.
- Acqui-hire-style shutdowns of small personalization vendors concentrate that capability inside a few large distribution owners, narrowing independent options for mid-sized merchants and publishers alike.
The trend: Content-recommendation networks are absorbing e-commerce personalization and retail ad tech piece by piece, converting publisher widgets into commerce-intent platforms.